this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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iPhones have been exposing your unique MAC despite Apple’s promises otherwise — “From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14 (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology
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iPhones have been exposing your unique MAC despite Apple’s promises otherwise — “From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14::“From the get-go, this feature was useless,” researcher says of feature put into iOS 14.

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[–] Confuserated 61 points 1 year ago (2 children)

tl;dr It was a bug. It is fixed in 17.1.

[–] sir_reginald 59 points 1 year ago (2 children)

this is whitewashing Apple. It was introduced in iOS 14. A trillion dollar company like apple should have had this fixed long before.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lol, and Apple didn't even "discover" it themselves. It was 2 unaffiliated security researchers who did. Who knows if they even implemented any logic besides the UI.

[–] poopkins 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you had read the article, you would have known that the bug relates to a very specific field inside a multicast payload and a network-specific unique MAC address is generated and retained as advertised. I'm not defending Apple; just reiterating the facts.

[–] eskimofry 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The way multicast works is that the destination mac address starts with 01 00 5e and then next 3 octets (mac addresses are 6 octets long) are copied from the IP address lower octets. The mac address is always this when building the L2 headers for the packet.

[–] poopkins 1 points 1 year ago

It's not specified what precisely is provided in the payload of the multicast body. I suspect that the original MAC address is included in something like a Bonjour broadcast, but I wasn't able to find any documentation that confirms that.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

apple should have had this fixed long before

not if it was intentional. I mean apple bends over for authoritarian governments around the world. This could easily be used as a state surveillance apparatus and casually "fixed" when discovered down the road as a "bug".

[–] sir_reginald 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

yeah I agree that it was intentional. I can't believe Apple didn't properly test this feature. But I didn't want to speculate without actual proof

[–] SuckMyWang 4 points 1 year ago

Why not? Everyone else seems to be doing it, you’re probably just some Portuguese pastrie chef with a bad hair cut and a paid off mortgage

[–] danc4498 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmm, tldr bot didn’t mention this…

[–] ForgotAboutDre 19 points 1 year ago

This is why we call it artificial intelligence, rather than digital intelligence.